I am not familiar with the term, "federated" or its meaning... I'm hoping to get some serious answers and perhaps even some comedic answers....
Edit: thank you to all who answered my call for enlightenment. I'm even more confused (and hopeful) than I was before!
we moved to mainline lemmy, away from what we used to have, which was a bunch of custom stuff built on top of a now ancient version of lemmy
now the devs can add features and stuff from lemmy way easier
including federation, which as far as i know is not turned on yet